The
day after Barack Obama won Florida’s then-27 electoral votes in 2008,
Organizing for America began engaging Floridians in an ongoing
conversation with our supporters and open-minded residents about
supporting the President’s agenda and working to re-elect him in 2012.

In
the process, the hard working grassroots volunteers of OFA-FL have
worked to build the largest grassroots organization in state
history.

The facts are truly remarkable:

·
Organizing for America has opened 103offices in the state.

·
More than 20,000 people completed the extensive voter registration training required before volunteers could register voters.

Vote Now and Absentee Ballots

Compared
with the same date in 2008, the Republicans’ traditional advantage in
vote-by-mail has shrunk by 67% from R +249,813 to just
R +61,456.

Working
with local Supervisors of Elections (SOE), we have worked to make it
easier for Floridians to vote with our in-person absentee
voting initiative Vote Now! which encourages voters to
simply go to their local SOE office, request a ballot and vote in
person. Most Florida counties are allowing their residents to vote this
way, and thanks to OFA-FL’s Vote Now!
efforts, we expect to continue to significantly outperform 2008’s
voting record prior to the start of Early Voting.

Voter Registration

The
largest ever voter registration effort in Florida history – by
Organizing for America – has led to a net increase
in the number of Democratic registrations compared with the number of
Republican registrations every single month for the last five months.
This improvement has been driven by a substantial gain in the percentage
of Hispanic voters registering as Democrats.
In fact, while the total number of registered Hispanics has increased
by more than 195,000 since August and less than 18,000 of those are
Republican. This means just 9% of the increase in Hispanic
registrations was accounted for by Republicans. The other
91% accrued to Democrats and independents.

In
2008, Republicans built up a huge advantage in vote-by-mail which
Democrats obliterated during in-person early vote to win the
state by 3 percentage points. In 2012, Republicans have a much more
difficult task ahead since they have already ceded two-thirds of the
vote-by-mail advantage they started with four years ago.

The
African-American and Caribbean-American registered voter population
increased by more than 50,000. The number of non-Hispanic
white registered voters actually fell by 44,000.

With these facts taken into account it serves as a reminder that on Election Day, the race in Florida is always close.
Since 1992, nearly 33 million ballots have been
cast in presidential elections in Florida, while the average separation between the two parties over those five presidential
elections is less than 60 thousand votes.

It
is also worth noting that the Presidential incumbent has won Florida in
every re-election since 1984. Thanks to our volunteer-driven
grassroots operation, and the voter registration efforts undertaken by
OFA-FL, President Obama is extremely well positioned to continue this
trend and win the state Florida.